Re: <nettime> WG: Fwd: Re: Forms of decisionism

[Ludger Eversmann <ludger.eversmann@t-online.de>]

   The question if there is a way to kickstart effective demand again and
   all in all to return to the Golden 1960-1970's in terms of strong
   parliaments, strong labor unions and productivity gains going in high
   proportions to wages (and resulting demand) may be difficult to answer;
   allthough in my view there are a lot of indications that support the
   assumption that it will not, and beyond this question the fact is more
   and more drastically drawing attention that ecology won't stand a
   strong and sustaining growth of consumation of ressources.

   But there is a different question: is the idea of eternal never ending
   growth the best idea that is possibly imaginable? Is there no idea of
   progress to define and derive other than progress in the total of
   produced and available made goods?

   A related question to this is: is there a criteria of progress for the
   performance of production systems namable, other than gains of
   productivity? During the late 1980s through 1990s and the period of the
   CIM euphory the ideal of the fully automated "factory of the future"
   was in place. One factory that produces automobiles, one for furniture
   or one for tires, but all fully automated, at least as fully as
   possible. Obviously, if this ideal would be possible to reach, economy
   would collapse, as Karl Marx already wrote in his machine fragment
   (Mason). From the late 1990s up to day the ideal of the the equally
   productive and at the same time flexible or universal factory of the
   future was proclaimed. If we imagine this ideal possibly was driven to
   reality - would this lead to "better" economical conditions, to
   sustainable, justifiable, rational and multipliable economic orders?

   Today i downloaded a paper by Joshua Pierce
   ([1]http://link.springer.com/article/10.1057%2Fjibs.2015.47) on the
   impact of additive manufacturing (3D-printing) on global value chains.
   He finds that "..Potentially, wider adoption of this technology has the
   potential to partially reverse the trend towards global specialization
   of production systems into elements that may be geographically
   dispersed and closer to the end-users (localization). This leaves the
   question of whether in some industries diffusion of 3D printing
   technologies may change the role of multinational enterprises as
   coordinators of global value chains by inducing the engagement of a
   wider variety of firms, even households."

   3D-printing is one of some other digitized production technologies that
   all together allow for highly productive and at the sime time very
   flexible up to universal production systems. Now if there are
   households as creators of some value of use, and additional public
   enterprises, that offer this kind of universal production capacity,
   which can be individually transformed into goods like the homogene
   product of energy suppliers can individually formed into light or heat,
   the role of multinational enterprises obviously would be changed,
   depending on the level and the density of "prosumer production" that
   can be achieved. This could mean for the public to regain political
   power to install some regulations necessary for the whole of the
   economy,  which to install labor unions and parliaments have become too
   weak.

   But, above all, this would mean a change in the direction of
   development: not everlasting growth, competition, hunting for market
   shares and profits, but creation of production systems (besides
   traditional private enterprises) which are located close to the place
   of consumption, and owned and driven possibly by households, but also
   by communities or other public subjects on different levels.

   So in this way indeed the "means of production" could shift into the
   hands of the public - at least some, a part of them. A society would
   come to existence which owns a good portion of the high tech and
   automated machinery that creates her own wealth - a good idea?

   And the question can be turned the other way round: if it is possible
   to develop production systems which are able to satisfy a wide range of
   possible consum wishes of their owners, what is the best economic order
   to build around them?

   Anyway, production systems seem to develop into this direction; digital
   fabrication means to produce on demand instead of on stock, in small
   batches, close to the place of consumption, and in separation of
   fabrication and design, which means that fabrication means the
   realization of digitized models of goods. The more this possible, the
   less a good remains to be a commodity, instead of a value in use.

   And, quite obviously, this could have quite far reaching consequences
   for the surrounding economic order, it seems, at least to me.

   Regards, Ludger
   Von meinem iPad gesendet

   Am 25.07.2016 um 07:10 schrieb Alex Foti <[2]alex.foti@gmail.com>:

     I totally agree you have to look at productivity distribution regimes
     (in this boyer-coriat supplemented perez-freeman) - in 1950-1973 it was
     basically productivity growth out of taylorized assemly-line operation
     going to wages (in the US, for Germany, Japan and other laggards it
     kept prices low and enable export-led growth and catch up) - then the
     1973-1979 �last spell of working class insurgence and stagflation -
     Fordist accumulation and Keynesian regulation end in inflatio.� With
     the 1979-1983 monetarist recession and attendant deindustrialization,
     the mutation of the economy starts toward informationalism. The
     productivity growth regime under informationalism is radically
     different than under mature fordism: productivity now goes either goes
     to profits or in falling prices (or a combination of the two) but not
     to wages (the great stagnation). neoliberalism doesn't deliver the
     goods - if you're a wage earner you have buy em on credit. i submit the
     hypothesis that that the structural cause of the demand crisis you
     rightly see as the dominant factor in the Great Recession is in fact
     the inability of neoliberal (de)regulation of distributing the fruits
     of technological progress to the population at large, unlike Fordism.
     However i completely disagree with the the neostagnationist idea (�la
     Hansen) that demand is now saturated and there is no way to kickstart
     effective demand and take the economy out of the doldrums where
     wrong-headed policies have moored it for 8 years already. Poverty and
     malnutrition are plaguing even western cities. College attendance is
     falling due to rising costs. Mass youth unemployment is a reality.
 <...>

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